Ponce-de-Leon, Hernán, Kinder, Johannes.
2022.
Cats vs. Spectre: An Axiomatic Approach to Modeling Speculative Execution Attacks. 2022 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP). :235–248.
The SPECTRE family of speculative execution attacks has required a rethinking of formal methods for security. Approaches based on operational speculative semantics have made initial inroads towards finding vulnerable code and validating defenses. However, with each new attack grows the amount of microarchitectural detail that has to be integrated into the underlying semantics. We propose an alternative, lightweight and axiomatic approach to specifying speculative semantics that relies on insights from memory models for concurrency. We use the CAT modeling language for memory consistency to specify execution models that capture speculative control flow, store-to-load forwarding, predictive store forwarding, and memory ordering machine clears. We present a bounded model checking framework parameterized by our speculative CAT models and evaluate its implementation against the state of the art. Due to the axiomatic approach, our models can be rapidly extended to allow our framework to detect new types of attacks and validate defenses against them.
Bo, Lili, Meng, Xing, Sun, Xiaobing, Xia, Jingli, Wu, Xiaoxue.
2022.
A Comprehensive Analysis of NVD Concurrency Vulnerabilities. 2022 IEEE 22nd International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability and Security (QRS). :9–18.
Concurrency vulnerabilities caused by synchronization problems will occur in the execution of multi-threaded programs, and the emergence of concurrency vulnerabilities often cause great threats to the system. Once the concurrency vulnerabilities are exploited, the system will suffer various attacks, seriously affecting its availability, confidentiality and security. In this paper, we extract 839 concurrency vulnerabilities from Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE), and conduct a comprehensive analysis of the trend, classifications, causes, severity, and impact. Finally, we obtained some findings: 1) From 1999 to 2021, the number of concurrency vulnerabilities disclosures show an overall upward trend. 2) In the distribution of concurrency vulnerability, race condition accounts for the largest proportion. 3) The overall severity of concurrency vulnerabilities is medium risk. 4) The number of concurrency vulnerabilities that can be exploited for local access and network access is almost equal, and nearly half of the concurrency vulnerabilities (377/839) can be accessed remotely. 5) The access complexity of 571 concurrency vulnerabilities is medium, and the number of concurrency vulnerabilities with high or low access complexity is almost equal. The results obtained through the empirical study can provide more support and guidance for research in the field of concurrency vulnerabilities.
Saldutti, Marco, Yu, Yi, Kristensen, Philip Trøst, Kountouris, George, Mørk, Jesper.
2022.
Carrier dynamics in nonlinear photonic nanocavities with extreme dielectric confinement. 2022 IEEE Photonics Conference (IPC). :1–2.
We show that a new type of dielectric cavity featuring deep sub-wavelength light confinement allows a significant speedup of all-optical signal processing functionalities, without compromising the energy efficiency. The effect is due to enhanced diffusion dynamics in an unconventional geometry.
ISSN: 2575-274X
Power, Conor, Staszewski, Robert Bogdan, Blokhina, Elena.
2022.
Cryogenic Transistor Confinement Well Simulation through Material and Carrier Transport Decoupling. 2022 29th IEEE International Conference on Electronics, Circuits and Systems (ICECS). :1–2.
We propose a methodology for the simulation of electrostatic confinement wells in transistors at cryogenic temperatures. This is considered in the context of 22-nm fully depleted silicon-on-insulator transistors due to their potential for imple-menting quantum bits in scalable quantum computing systems. To overcome thermal fluctuations and improve decoherence times in most quantum bit implementations, they must be operated at cryogenic temperatures. We review the dominant sources of electric field at these low temperatures, including material interface work function differences and trapped interface charges. Intrinsic generation and dopant ionisation are shown to be negligible at cryogenic temperatures when using a mode of operation suitable for confinement. We propose studying cryogenic electrostatic confinement wells in transistors using a finite-element model simulation, and decoupling carrier transport generated fields.
Zhu, Lu, Wei, Yehua, Jiang, Haoran, Long, Jing.
2022.
CAN FD Message Authentication Enhances Parallel in-vehicle Applications Security. 2022 2nd International Conference on Intelligent Technology and Embedded Systems (ICITES). :155–160.
Controller Area Network with Flexible Data-rate(CAN FD) has the advantages of high bandwidth and data field length to meet the higher communication requirements of parallel in-vehicle applications. If the CAN FD lacking the authentication security mechanism is used, it is easy to make it suffer from masquerade attack. Therefore, a two-stage method based on message authentication is proposed to enhance the security of it. In the first stage, an anti-exhaustive message exchange and comparison algorithm is proposed. After exchanging the message comparison sequence, the lower bound of the vehicle application and redundant message space is obtained. In the second stage, an enhanced round accumulation algorithm is proposed to enhance security, which adds Message Authentication Codes(MACs) to the redundant message space in a way of fewer accumulation rounds. Experimental examples show that the proposed two-stage approach enables both small-scale and large-scale parallel in-vehicle applications security to be enhanced. Among them, in the Adaptive Cruise Control Application(ACCA), when the laxity interval is 1300μs, the total increased MACs is as high as 388Bit, and the accumulation rounds is as low as 40 rounds.
Albornoz-De Luise, Romina Soledad, Arnau-González, Pablo, Arevalillo-Herráez, Miguel.
2022.
Conversational Agent Design for Algebra Tutoring. 2022 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC). :604–609.
Conversational Intelligent Tutoring Systems (CITS) in learning environments are capable of providing personalized instruction to students in different domains, to improve the learning process. This interaction between the Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) and the user is carried out through dialogues in natural language. In this study, we use an open source framework called Rasa to adapt the original button-based user interface of an algebraic/arithmetic word problem-solving ITS to one based primarily on the use of natural language. We conducted an empirical study showing that once properly trained, our conversational agent was able to recognize the intent related to the content of the student’s message with an average accuracy above 0.95.
ISSN: 2577-1655
Ranieri, Angelo, Ruggiero, Andrea.
2022.
Complementary role of conversational agents in e-health services. 2022 IEEE International Conference on Metrology for Extended Reality, Artificial Intelligence and Neural Engineering (MetroXRAINE). :528–533.
In recent years, business environments are undergoing disruptive changes across sectors [1]. Globalization and technological advances, such as artificial intelligence and the internet of things, have completely redesigned business activities, bringing to light an ever-increasing interest and attention towards the customer [2], especially in healthcare sector. In this context, researchers is paying more and more attention to the introduction of new technologies capable of meeting the patients’ needs [3, 4] and the Covid-19 pandemic has contributed and still contributes to accelerate this phenomenon [5]. Therefore, emerging technologies (i.e., AI-enabled solutions, service robots, conversational agents) are proving to be effective partners in improving medical care and quality of life [6]. Conversational agents, often identified in other ways as “chatbots”, are AI-enabled service robots based on the use of text [7] and capable of interpreting natural language and ensuring automation of responses by emulating human behavior [8, 9, 10]. Their introduction is linked to help institutions and doctors in the management of their patients [11, 12], at the same time maintaining the negligible incremental costs thanks to their virtual aspect [13–14]. However, while the utilization of these tools has significantly increased during the pandemic [15, 16, 17], it is unclear what benefits they bring to service delivery. In order to identify their contributions, there is a need to find out which activities can be supported by conversational agents.This paper takes a grounded approach [18] to achieve contextual understanding design and to effectively interpret the context and meanings related to conversational agents in healthcare interactions. The study context concerns six chatbots adopted in the healthcare sector through semi-structured interviews conducted in the health ecosystem. Secondary data relating to these tools under consideration are also used to complete the picture on them. Observation, interviewing and archival documents [19] could be used in qualitative research to make comparisons and obtain enriched results due to the opportunity to bridge the weaknesses of one source by compensating it with the strengths of others. Conversational agents automate customer interactions with smart meaningful interactions powered by Artificial Intelligence, making support, information provision and contextual understanding scalable. They help doctors to conduct the conversations that matter with their patients. In this context, conversational agents play a critical role in making relevant healthcare information accessible to the right stakeholders at the right time, defining an ever-present accessible solution for patients’ needs. In summary, conversational agents cannot replace the role of doctors but help them to manage patients. By conveying constant presence and fast information, they help doctors to build close relationships and trust with patients.